


Dream Lover(?)

by CobaltStargazer



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Dream Sex, F/M, Gothic, Hauntings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 02:17:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5029846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CobaltStargazer/pseuds/CobaltStargazer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a monstrous love. And it makes monsters of them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream Lover(?)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justanothersong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/gifts).



At night, she dreamt of Thomas.

Once she was well away, having half-walked, half-dragged Alan from the house's grounds, Edith realized that the cruel words he'd deceived her with had been partly true. There _were_ ways she had been a foolish girl, running into his arms because Father was dead and she had nowhere to go. She'd loved him with the bright intensity of the morning sun, but in the short span of their marriage that vibrant light had been eclipsed by the dark planet of his sister's malevolence. He had been a venal man, her Thomas. Venal and weak and easily led, but even though the bold glare of her love had faded into shadows, the power of the shadows was something she'd always been aware of.

And so, she dreamt of him.

He came to her as a man, not as a spirit, but he was pale and cold and hollow-eyed, having become part of what lay beyond the veil. If he had not believed in the ghosts she spoke of before, he likely did now. Edith welcomed him. Alive or dead, Thomas was her husband, and she tried not to consider that one of the reasons for Lucille's anger, a reason outside of her madness, was that he had ceased to keep himself pure for her. To think that would be to destroy the remnants of her affections, and after all that had happened, what would that leave her with?

Thomas' skin was cool against hers, and the wound on his face had closed. The dead didn't bear scars. Alan didn't know about the dreams, and Edith never intended to tell him. He'd have thought her a lunatic, fit for an asylum. But in sleep, she can be the wife she'd wanted to be, and would have been, if it hadn't been for Thomas' greed and his sister's crazed mind.

The act of love, the slide of hands over flesh, the joining of bodies that brought a cataclysm, was as Edith remembered it, but her husband's lack of body heat was unsettling even in slumber. Often, she woke up with the bedcovers twisted around her as though there actually had been two bodies occupying the bed, but of course it was only a dream. It made her sad that it was only in death Thomas had managed to escape from the house. She wondered if Lucille had been forced to remain behind, separated from her brother at last.

But she never spoke of it, lest she be thought of a monster as well. Because there _was_ one thing Lucille had been correct about - loving Thomas Sharpe had left Edith...unwhole. Not incomplete, although without her husband that was an apt description as well, but unsound. The dreams, even if they were only dreams, indicated that she loved a dead man, had kept enough of him close that he had followed her away from his childhood home. The dead had memories, _long_ memories. The specters that had haunted Crimson Peak proved that. Now her husband was among them.

And he had come here to find her.


End file.
